He looks out of place, at least at first. Wearing a Mets uniform that grants no slimming effect to his block of a body, he could easily be mistaken for an overinvested fan who has wandered past assorted “Authorized Personnel Only” signs at Citi Field, onto the outfield grass.

But this is the night’s starting pitcher, Bartolo Colon. Forty-two years old, it is believed. Two hundred eighty-five pounds, it is believed — a full 100 pounds heavier than when he made his major league debut in 1997. An Ernest Borgnine face, by way of the Dominican Republic. The mere sight of him stirs the “if he can, I can” fantasies of Sunday softball heroes everywhere.

Colon is the second-oldest active player in the majors. He has collected eight teams’ uniforms, 213 career wins, a Cy Young Award and a steroid-related suspension. In an often frustrating Mets season, this Everyman has been a joyful diversion, with a 9-7 record that includes 48⅓ innings without a walk, a franchise record worthy of pause.

And yet his Fred Flintstone body type can make his successes seem accidental, almost comical. A city chuckles when his helmet flies off as he swings his bat, and shakes its head in disbelief when he puts on another display of pinpoint accuracy with pitches that rarely top 92 miles an hour — as if he’s gotten lucky, again.

It’s not luck. Every six days or so, Colon defies the general perception that a professional athlete’s body needs to be lean, chiseled and mean. His long, successful career suggests that some mystery in the metrics-obsessed sport remains, that good pitching cannot be measured in a waistline.

“There’s just a bias against big people,” the former Mets pitcher Ron Darling, an admitted Colon fan, said. “But he can do it without having that perfect computer body. He is a master pitcher.”

Standing now in the outfield, Colon bends down with knees locked to touch his dark blue cleats, lingering to straighten the crumpled bottoms of his pant legs — as if to signal that he belongs among the sinewy young athletes gamboling about him. Do not be fooled by the packaging.

His warm-up ritual continues. A friendly salute to his opponent, Jon Lester of the Chicago Cubs. A 20-yard jog. The tossing of a dark weighted ball, a kind of baseball shot put, with the bullpen catcher Dave Racaniello, exactly eight times. Then out comes a white baseball.

The gum-chewing Colon backpedals as he throws, increasing the yardage, while the evening sun casts his shadow long in easy metaphor across the grass. The game’s oldest starting pitcher spits in his large shadow’s general direction.

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Colon warming up before a game against the Cubs on June 30.CreditMark Kauzlarich/The New York Times

“I feel good with the weight I have,” he later says.

Colon has played for so long that he is a constant of summer, on the mound in Anaheim, Calif.; Boston; or somewhere in between. His ubiquity tends to eclipse his back story, which seems lifted from an inspirational volume of young-adult sports fiction by Matt Christopher: “Weighing Every Pitch,” maybe, or “The Chubby Pitcher Out of Nowhere.”

He comes from a hillside village on the outskirts of Altamira called El Copey, which has one main road and dozens of squat houses under zinc roofs and coconut trees. Local lore attributes his strong legs to climbing trees, and his strong wrists to the childhood chores of picking coffee beans and turning the crank of a machine that removes the pulp from the beans.

“From childhood, he was very strong,” his father, Miguel Valerio Colon, recalled. “He was capable of pulping up to 1,000 crates of coffee beans in a day.”

Sometimes, while transporting bags of beans for his father’s produce business, young Bartolo would park his pet donkey, Pancho, beside a sloping lot that served as a baseball field and play a few innings with other children, using balls made of cloth.

“The only way you would be able to play was to escape from my dad,” Colon said, “because the main thing was working.”

If the pulping machine built up his arms, then throwing rocks to knock fruit from trees developed his accuracy. “Throwing at coconuts and mangoes,” Colon said. “But the coconut was the most difficult.”

Word of his exploits in local leagues soon reached Winston Llenas, known as Chilote, a former major leaguer working for the Cleveland Indians. Llenas recalls that while the young prospect did not have a typical pitcher’s physique, he possessed obvious talent and a commitment to hard work, a trait that Colon once said he learned from the likes of Pancho.

Colon signed with the Indians — who believed he was 18, not 20 — for $3,000 in 1993, with $500 going to the local scout who had brought him to Llenas’s attention. Within a year, he was pitching for a rookie league team in Burlington, N.C., and struggling with acute homesickness. He said that before going to the States, “I had spent maybe a week away from my father.” Three of his Burlington teammates would also reach the major leagues, one lingering for only 25 at-bats. All three have since disappeared from any big-league roster.

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Colon during his first season in the major leagues, with the Cleveland Indians in 1997.CreditJames A. Finley/Associated Press

Colon eventually joined other promising prospects for a winter development program in Cleveland that included physical workouts, finance management seminars and, if needed, English lessons. He lived with Allen Davis, the team’s director of community relations at the time, who has redirected his life to become the Rev. Abraham Allende, a Lutheran bishop in northeastern Ohio.

“Raw in every sense of the word” is how Bishop Allende remembers Colon. Humble, decent, immature. Big-boned, like his parents. And very sensitive: “If he heard his name on the sports talk radio stations, he’d want to know right away: ‘What are they saying? What are they saying?’ ”

“Baseball was all he knew,” the bishop said. “And he had this desire to succeed so he could help his family out.”

Colon arcs one of his warm-up pitches so high it seems to dawdle in the heavens before plopping into Racaniello’s mitt. The two men bump fists, hug and walk to the dusky bullpen beneath the right-field stands, below a large billboard for Wise Potato Chips.

Soon he is on a small mound in the half-light, throwing hard from a set position. Less than 20 feet away, in the visitors’ bullpen visible through a separating chain-link fence, Lester — a former teammate in Boston — is doing the same. Pop! Pop! Pop! The sound of balls hitting leather is like fireworks on a timed detonator.

Colon began as a power pitcher who would immediately look for the radar-gun reading. He still throws mostly fastballs, but he does so with such precision, and at such alternating speeds, that on his best days he leaves batters flummoxed.

“The thing about Bart that no one talks about enough: This guy really knows what he’s doing out there,” said Cubs Manager Joe Maddon, who was a coach in Anaheim and Los Angeles when Colon played for the Angels (and yes, the veteran Colon knows everybody). “He can throw a strike any time he wants, to either side of the plate.”

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A Colon at-bat, like his strikeout on May 5 at Citi Field, can often supply comic relief in an inconsistent Mets season.CreditElsa/Getty Images

Darling said he tried not to gush about Colon, but then he did. Here is a power thrower who, with the diminishment that comes with age, has made the transition to finesse pitcher without much chicanery. Fastball, fastball, location, location, carving up the corners, adding sinking action, changing speeds.

“It’s genius,” Darling said.

Couple this with Colon’s workhorse nature — think of Pancho — and he is somehow able to become stronger as the game progresses. “He’s throwing 88 miles an hour,” Darling said. “Then, when he needs to, in the seventh inning, all of a sudden, 92, 93.”

Consider the Mets rookie Noah Syndergaard, 22 years old and able to throw at 99 miles an hour. In the Colon paradigm, Darling said, Syndergaard “would have to have the ability, in 2035, to throw the ball 92 miles an hour. In a big league game.”

Colon stops his warm-ups and lowers his head, hands crossed at his waist, glove at his feet. It is time for “The Star-Spangled Banner,” sung by a young woman at home plate, some 400 feet away. When she finishes strong, he blesses himself twice, picks up his glove and adds a few punctuating fireworks.

Pop! Pop! Pop!

Colon made his major league debut so long ago that the world had yet to hear of a White House intern named Monica Lewinsky. On April 4, 1997, he started against the Angels in Anaheim, and it did not go well: a single by his first batter, a walk by the second batter — four runs in five innings.

At times like this, his confidence, more than his technique, would become the issue.

“He was just a natural,” said Ray Negron, a special consultant for the Yankees and a former Indians employee. “You can’t teach that, and you don’t try to unravel it either, because you’ll only mess up the product. Just make sure that he is confident.”

After struggling that first season, Colon emerged the next year as an All-Star who posted a 14-9 record. He began decorating and numbering each of his game-winning balls with colored pens, a hobby that continues to this day.

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Colon, center right, celebrated in Altamira after receiving the American League Cy Young Award in 2005. Left, the Bartolo Colon Baseball Stadium/School in El Copey.CreditLeft: Amelia Deschamps for The New York Times. Right: Associated Press

Teammates over the years have described him as gregarious, supportive and not above the occasional athletic parlor trick, such as standing at home plate and throwing a baseball over the outfield wall. But in public he has remained mostly quiet, and always uses a translator for his brief English-language interviews — for fear, it seems, of being misunderstood.

This sometimes annoyed Negron, his mentor and interpreter in Cleveland. He recalled Colon’s being asked about a coming matchup against a countryman, the Boston Red Sox ace Pedro Martinez.

Over the many years, Colon seems to have embodied major league baseball — the heights of its highs and the depths of its lows — as he has played for the Indians, the long-gone Montreal Expos, the Chicago White Sox, the Angels in Anaheim and Los Angeles, the Red Sox, the White Sox again, the Yankees, the Oakland A’s and, since last year, the Mets.

A 2005 winner of the Cy Young Award, an honor that prompted a weeklong celebration in Altamira. Appearances in three All-Star games and six postseasons. More wins than any active pitcher other than Tim Hudson of the San Francisco Giants, who has 219. More than 2,100 strikeouts. More than 2,800 innings pitched. Has faced more than 12,200 batters.

In one game, for the A’s in 2012, he threw 81 of his 108 pitches for strikes, including 38 in a row.

But Colon has also had his lesser moments.

He arrived at a few spring trainings out of shape. Returned to the Dominican Republic rather than serve a subordinate role as his Boston teammates fought for a postseason berth in 2008. Temporarily vanished in 2009 during a minor league rehabilitation assignment. Quietly underwent a novel stem-cell injection procedure that may have rejuvenated his right shoulder and career but also drew the scrutiny of Major League Baseball.

Most notoriously, he tested positive in 2012 for performance-enhancing drugs, an attempt to thwart the aging process that earned him a 50-game suspension and the disappointment of his father.

“I told him,” the elder Colon recalled, as he played dominoes under some El Copey shade, “if you need to go back to using stuff that causes you harm, you should quit baseball so that you don’t lose your father before it’s my time.”

Colon is famously resistant to interviews — out of humility, his admirers say — but he finally agreed to a brief interview in the lobby outside the clubhouse. He often studied his cellphone screen while the bullpen coach Ricky Bones interpreted his answers, but he became more animated when talk turned to his family, to Pancho the donkey, or to anything related to El Copey.

His career highlight, Colon said, came when he gave his Cy Young Award to his father. As for lowlights, he mentioned the year he left baseball, after a beloved brother-in-law was killed in the Dominican Republic.

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Colon's father, Miguel Valerio Colon, right. Bartolo Colon was raised in El Copey, a hillside village that has one paved road, left.CreditAmelia Deschamps for The New York Times

“And after,” he said. “When I tested positive.”

With game time just minutes away, Colon throws his last warm-up pitch. He tosses a towel over his left shoulder and adjusts the Mets cap on his large head. He is an American now, a naturalized citizen who lives with his wife, Rosanna, and their four sons in a brick house in Clifton, N.J.

Back in El Copey, though, people still show their fealty for a native son by wearing the cap of his latest team. Long gone are the blue and red of the Indians, the green and yellow of the A’s. These days they wear the intertwined NY, orange against blue.

Perhaps it is because Colon, who has earned more than $95 million as a ballplayer, has given so much to his hometown. He provides scholarships, hands out hundreds of free meals at Christmastime and, through a friend and intermediary, gives money to many seeking financial assistance.

He has carved a baseball stadium out of the hillside, erected a Roman Catholic chapel and built a training complex for young baseball prospects that includes a small museum. Here are a pair of Colon’s major league cleats. Here, a wall illustration telling the story of his beloved donkey, Pancho. And here, an old, crank-style pulping machine, with a sign offering a dare:

TRY YOUR STRENGTH AGAINST BARTOLO’S

25 TURNS – BARTOLITO

50 TURNS – BARTOLO

100 TURNS – SENOR BARTOLO

Then again, perhaps the people of El Copey wear their Mets hats to honor a man who may have violated his sport’s drug policy but kept true to an even more sacred rule: Always remember where you came from.

As Colon walks toward the bullpen door that opens to the outfield, the other Mets pitchers form an honor guard to greet him with the latest expression of support in fashion: hand slaps and finger snaps. Given his age, the moment carries an air of deference, while also silently raising the question of how many of these young men will still be pitching at 42.

Several of the pitchers trail after him as he walks slowly across the grass, head bowed, shadow longer. Within two hours he will have pitched a minimasterpiece within a game that the Mets will lose: three hits, one walk and no runs in seven innings.

For now, though, he is just another heavyset man heading off to his shift, intent on proving he belongs.

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Colon with catcher Kevin Plawecki and the pitching coach Dan Warthen on June 30 at Citi Field.CreditMark Kauzlarich/The New York Times

Reporting was contributed by Amelia Deschamps in El Copey, Dominican Republic, and Tim Rohan, Elena Gustines and Rob Harms in New York.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: A Mets Pitcher, Noted for His Curves, Still Confounds at 42 (ish). Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe